Equity split is how a startup's founder shares are divided among co-founders at incorporation, recorded in the founders agreement and on the cap table. It is one of the most consequential decisions the founders will ever make together, and unlike almost every other early decision, it is very hard to undo.
In Noam Wasserman's research on more than 10,000 founders ("The Founder's Dilemmas," 2012), the most common pattern is an equal split: roughly 73 percent of founding teams divide equity equally, often within a month of starting the company. Wasserman calls this the "quick handshake" split and finds it correlates with worse outcomes, because it usually skips the harder conversation about who is contributing what and what they w...